From the Magazine

Arianna Calling!

No question that Arianna Huffington is driven, but by what: Power? Fame? Money? Ideas? Ideals? When a woman has married a gay multi-millionaire, run for California governor, and morphed from conservative Washington pundit to liberal L.A. activist, the answer isn’t simple.

Blogger, TV commentator, and social dynamo Arianna Huffington works one of the 10 phone lines at her home office, in Brentwood, California, October 6, 2005.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

It is another busy day at the end of another busy week for Arianna Huffington. She has been up since five a.m. on this Friday in late August, returning phone calls to the East Coast, reading the papers, and knocking off the first of several columns she writes each day for her new online venture, the Huffington Post. At eight, a car from CNN arrived at her mansion, in Brentwood, as it does most Fridays, to shuttle Huffington to the taping of its weekly show Reliable Sources; after that, she was driven to Santa Monica for her weekly appearance on the public-radio political talk show Left, Right & Center. Back home shortly after noon, she has no time for lunch. There are calls to return, the phone rings nonstop, and her staff is lining up with questions. Settled on the couch in her book-lined study, Huffington calls out to her housekeeper in that soft, Zsa Zsa Gabor purr so well known to the millions who have seen her on TV over the years: “Daaahling, more tea!”

The tea arrives—“Thank you, sweetheaaarrrt”—and Huffington turns back to the matters at hand. An assistant wants to know which columns to include in the “blast”—a weekly digest of Huffington’s writings that is e-mailed to 80,000 subscribers. Another staffer wants to know whether a posting on today’s HuffPost that includes the phrase “fucked up” can be sent to Yahoo, which has just begun to run portions of the blog. The Hollywood mogul David Geffen has called, three times. The son of the former presidential candidate Gary Hart has called to say he wants to write a piece for the HuffPost about his father’s blogs on the HuffPost. Someone from the anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan’s entourage has called from Crawford, Texas. The 10 phone lines keep ringing, and the intercom goes off again and again: “Arianna, for you” … “Arianna, pick up” … “Ariaaanna.”

And so life has been for Arianna Huffington ever since May, when she and her business partner, Kenneth Lerer, a former AOL Time Warner executive, launched the Huffington Post. Part daily online newspaper—billed as the liberal answer to the Drudge Report—and part Internet salon, featuring cultural and political commentary, the HuffPost was also, on the day it launched, the biggest burst of star power ever to hit the blogosphere. Until recently, the prototypical blogger was an outsider, a lone voice at the computer, one of millions in a vast and ever more powerful conversation that has challenged the conventional wisdom as expressed by the mainstream media and, increasingly, affected national politics. With the HuffPost, however, Arianna Huffington was creating a site that would showcase the opinions of dozens of bloggers, all of them ultimate insiders.

A woman who has become famous for her gold-plated Rolodex, Huffington put out the calls to her friends last spring, asking them to contribute to her site. And because they “adore Arianna,” or owe her a favor, or “could not resist her,” about 300 of them said yes, including Pulitzer Prize winners Norman Mailer and David Mamet, political comedians Al Franken and Bill Maher, and the writer Nora Ephron. Walter Cronkite also signed on, as did Deepak Chopra and Huffington’s Hollywood friends—Warren Beatty, Rob Reiner, John Cusack, Mike Nichols, Norman Lear, and Gwyneth Paltrow. From Huffington’s political circle came Gary Hart, New Jersey politician Jon Corzine, former California governor Jerry Brown, and the activist Tom Hayden, among others. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said yes, as did the Democratic power broker Vernon Jordan and a host of political columnists, mainly liberals but a few from the right, including Tony Blankley, the Washington Times columnist who used to be Newt Gingrich’s press secretary. (Note: Huffington also approached the editor of this magazine about contributing to the site.)

And there many of them were on May 9, the day of the Huffington Post’s debut. Like nearly everything Arianna Huffington has ever done, the event attracted much press attention—but the initial reaction was harsh. Although there was praise for the HuffPost’s sleek layout and for its news section, which is overseen by Lerer, the verdicts on the blog side ran the gamut from “a sick hoax” to “a floundering vanity blog.” For Huffington, the writer who called it “nothing new” probably delivered the biggest put-down, unless one counts the review from LA Weekly: “Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar, and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one.” And that was from the professional media. In the blogosphere, new Web sites sprang up with such names as huffingtonisfullofcrap.com and huffingtonstoast.com. There were, to be sure, aspects of the new HuffPost that invited ridicule: incoherent blogs from celebrities including Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus; Deepak Chopra’s cryptic admonition that death was not to be feared, because “you are dead already”; and Huffington’s own post on the female orgasm, which she declared to be “so complex and strange it could only have come from God.” Wouldn’t it be “delicious,” she wrote, “if the female orgasm were the thing that tips the scales in favor of the Intelligent Design crowd?”

But as silly as some of the blogs were, the attacks on the HuffPost seemed to be based less on objections to the site’s content than on a general distaste for Huffington herself. She was, the Boston Herald sniped in the middle of a review of the site, “a woman who changes her politics like Jennifer Lopez switches husbands”; who, “unlike most bloggers,” said the Baltimore Sun, “hasn’t spent more than two days of her adult life out of the media spotlight.” The mockery was not surprising, perhaps, for during her 25 years in the U.S. the Greek-born Huffington has stirred up more than her share of controversy. A Cambridge-educated scholar and socialite, the author of 10 books (on subjects ranging from Picasso and Maria Callas to corporate greed and Greek mythology, to politics and spirituality), a television commentator, syndicated columnist, political wife, activist, and, most recently, in 2003, candidate for governor of California, Huffington has had many lives, all of them conducted very much in the public eye. And all of them involving a considerable amount of drama—from the allegations of plagiarism that followed the publication of two of her books to the gossip about the prominent men in her life, and the stories about her membership in a controversial cult headed by a former high-school teacher who woke up from a coma believing that he was an emissary of God.

Along the way, there was her marriage in 1986 to Michael Huffington, a conservative Republican multi-millionaire who served in Congress. There was also, in 1994, before his divorce from Arianna and his announcement that he was gay, Michael Huffington’s run for the U.S. Senate, in a campaign that Arianna was perceived to have masterminded. Denounced as a “right-wing Lady Macbeth” and excoriated for her “viciousness,” Arianna was savaged even by her husband’s campaign manager, who described her in his memoirs as “beautiful” but “evil.” The phrase would become a national joke, picked up in the 1990s by her friends Bill Maher and Al Franken, who would introduce her on their shows as “the beautiful but evil Arianna Huffington.”

That was when Arianna was a conservative Republican, one of Newt Gingrich’s devoted acolytes, and a noted right-wing columnist and television pundit—before she made what is probably the most baffling move of her life. In the late 90s, she re-invented herself as a liberal—and not a lukewarm liberal but, as the famously left-wing Al Franken puts it, “some strange, liberal, green kind of thing to my left.” Shutting the door on the Washington chapter of her life, Huffington moved to Los Angeles, where suddenly she was seen in the company of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. She began hosting fund-raisers in her mansion for environmental and anti-poverty causes and denouncing Republicans and conservative policies in her books, columns, and television appearances. In Los Angeles, as she has always done, Huffington befriended everyone who was anyone, and began marshaling her wealthy and influential new friends behind her causes: her provocative and much-publicized 2003 ad campaign against gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s, and her unsuccessful run for governor as an independent in the California recall race.

For many observers, the defining image of that campaign, and of Arianna, was the one of her knocking over a bank of press microphones as she elbowed her way through the crowd to stand next to Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, as they posed for the cameras in front of the Los Angeles County registrar’s office. That photograph, displayed in the pages of newspapers across the country, seemed to confirm what had been whispered about Arianna Huffington for years: that she would do, and say, just about anything to get attention. Privately, people called her everything from “an intellectual lap dancer” to a woman who, as one writer puts it, “doesn’t have any commitment to any core values, only to prominence,” and “doesn’t give a shit what people say about her, as long as they say it.” And as the Huffington Post debuted, this was the criticism that was heard all over again—that the site, as this man says, was just another “media play” in a life in which “every waking moment” has been about “getting visibility.”

Even some of the HuffPost’s contributors feared the worst early on: one was certain “the whole thing would implode”; another thought it was “too grandiose.” But then things began to change. David Mamet’s posting on the firing of New York magazine theater critic John Simon was picked up by the mainstream media, as was Nora Ephron’s witty post on how, during the years she was married to Carl Bernstein, she always suspected that Mark Felt was “Deep Throat.” In July, the HuffPost scored its first major newsbreak with an item by the journalist Laurence O’Donnell reporting that Karl Rove had been the source who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame to Matt Cooper of Time.

Meanwhile, Huffington’s own blogs were becoming Topic A at dinner parties in New York and Washington. Her “Russert Watch” offered tough critiques of Tim Russert’s weekly performance as host of NBC’s Meet the Press, and her “Judy File” raised uncomfortable questions about the New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who was jailed for contempt in the Valerie Plame leak case. Huffington called attention to Miller’s controversial pre-war reporting from Iraq, and she published the summer’s widespread rumor that Miller had been one of the administration’s sources on Valerie Plame—meaning that she had gone to jail to protect her career, not her sources. “She came out and wrote what a lot of people were talking about, but not writing,” says Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation.

Huffington also made waves with her wall-to-wall coverage of Cindy Sheehan (who blogged on the HuffPost), her lacerating denunciation of the Bush administration’s handling of the catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, and her continuing criticism of The New York Times and Judy Miller following the reporter’s release from prison in September—most notably Arianna’s evisceration of the Times’s October 16 mea culpa. As advertisers signed up for space on the HuffPost, and its content was featured by AOL and Yahoo, its audience began to grow—to some 1.5 million site visits in September and climbing. The numbers fell short of the Drudge Report’s three million, but they were enough to give Huffington’s critics—those who regard her as the intellectual equivalent of Paris Hilton—a reason to think again.

“It’s very brave to take on The New York Times,” says Maher, host of the HBO political comedy show Real Time with Bill Maher. “And Arianna is very brave. There’s nothing she feels she can’t say. She’s not beholden to anybody and she doesn’t worry about where the chips fall. There aren’t that many people in this country who say things and aren’t afraid to get booed.” According to Gary Hart, Huffington’s “detractors” have always tried to dismiss her as a “non-serious person,” but, he says, “she is very serious, and when she gets focused on something, there’s usually something very interesting there. She digs around, she works on instinct, until it’s clear.” Arianna, says one prominent media critic and friend, “has always been searching for something. Like Madonna, there’s been all this re-invention. She has worked so hard and she’s tried everything—television, marrying a rich man, right and left—and now, with the HuffPost, finally, it may all be coming together for her.”

Which would be something, considering that all the aspects of Arianna Huffington have never quite come together in the past.

Huffington is 55, but she looks at least 10 years younger—and not at all evil. She’s definitely beautiful, though. There are the high cheekbones and strong jaw, which play so well to the TV cameras, and her perfect posture, which has given some people the impression that she’s more than six feet tall, when in fact she is just five feet eight. Even in bell-bottom jeans, flats, and a simple white sleeveless blouse, she has a slightly regal mien. When she was a Republican, Huffington teased and sprayed her hair into a formidable red helmet, but these days she just blow-dries it and lets it hang loose to her shoulders. She seems, indeed, altogether relaxed as she sits at the table in her dining room, picking at the grilled salmon and vegetables that her housekeeper has prepared for our lunch.

The dining room is impressive—vast, and sun-filled, with polished white limestone floors that extend into a two-story rotunda at the center of the house and, toward the back, past a sunken, wood-paneled living room, to a wall of French doors that look out on the swimming pool. It is a cozy home, despite the miles of stone floors, gilt wrought-iron chandeliers, and Florentine furniture. The grand piano and side tables are crowded with framed photographs of family and friends, and the walls are hung with paintings by friends, including Picasso’s lover Françoise Gilot, and art by Huffington’s two daughters, Christina, 16, and Isabella, 14. Huffington bought the $7 million house seven years ago, after her divorce. “It is the longest I’ve lived anywhere,” she says.

Huffington’s smile is warm and easy, except for the eyes, which stare straight into yours and don’t let go—as if she is commanding not just your attention but your whole being. This intensity of focus has led friends to describe her as “spellbinding,” “incredibly seductive,” and “like a radiant heat wave.” And it’s not just the “Arianna gaze” that draws people in but her total concentration on the person she’s with. No matter how many important people are in the room, says Huffington’s friend the art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, “when Arianna’s talking to you there’s not that sense of social panic. When she’s with you, she is with you.”

Huffington’s conversation overflows with flattery and solicitous inquiries, and there is an almost hypnotic quality to her silken voice and her sultry accent—“which,” she has said, “makes everything I say sound vaguely naughty.” But it is when she starts to talk, really talk, that people are swept under. This is a woman who actually has read her Kierkegaard, her Schopenhauer, her John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx, and she can quote from them. At Cambridge she studied economics and was president of the university’s storied debating society, the Cambridge Union—which has made her a master sophist, capable of cutting an issue 16 ways and winning the argument without revealing what she really believes. On television, that has made her extraordinarily persuasive, a talk-show guest who “really knows her shit,” says Bill Maher, “and never stumbles.” In society, among the wealthy and influential, the sheer force of her mind has won her countless friends and admirers. “It’s why she pulls everyone in,” says her friend the socialite and author Sugar Rautbord. “Arianna is probably one of the most intellectually seductive human beings on the face of the planet. She has such a powerful brain, and she exudes an intellectuality that is almost sexual.”

Which is not to say that Arianna Huffington is insincere. On the contrary, she brings great passion to everything she does, especially her politics. Laurie David, an environmental activist and the wife of Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David, remembers how distressed she was two years ago when she showed up at Huffington’s for a hike and saw Arianna’s Lincoln Navigator in the driveway. David, who had spent months talking to Huffington about the environmental toll of gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and about the foreign-policy implications of U.S. oil consumption, told Huffington, “If you aren’t connecting the dots, who will?” In a matter of weeks, David says, Huffington had sold her Navigator and bought a little hybrid Prius. And soon after that, she organized the Detroit Project, the group of environmentalists and Hollywood producers that designed and financed the anti-S.U.V. ad campaign. One spot showed S.U.V. owners saying, “I like to sit up high” and “I sent our soldiers off to war.” “You talk to her about an idea and within an hour and two phone calls it happens,” David says. “Arianna is definitely someone you want on your side. And she is a true believer.”

What Huffington believes right now is that we must “change the way we are doing things in America,” she says, “because I believe that the status quo is very destructive for many people at this moment in this country. The war [in Iraq], poverty, inequality, the war on drugs—which is decimating minorities, filling our jails with nonviolent drug offenders—the spinelessness of politicians in both political parties, but the spinelessness of Democrats, especially, in responding to the assaults of the Republicans … “ She keeps going, her indignation rising: “I mean look at them. There are almost 60 percent of Americans against the war and there is no Democratic leader articulating that position. It is astounding. And the way the system is rigged, with lobbyists and money, towards perpetuating inequalities and unfairness, and how we have stopped being shocked by what’s going on. The passage of the energy bill is shocking, shocking, in the middle of a war and rising gas prices. But people are not shocked. That is why I am so passionate about the blogosphere.… Covering something relentlessly, day in and day out, is the only thing you can hope will penetrate and help to change things.”

It is the desire to “change things,” friends insist, that makes Huffington work as hard as she does, so hard that one Hollywood friend says she is sometimes afraid “that Arianna is going to have a breakdown. Except for her children, there is nothing in her life other than her work.” No one who knows Arianna well doubts her passion. It’s just that, in the words of one political journalist who has known her for more than a decade, “there’s always a small degree of amnesia required with Arianna.”

Huffington with her daughters, Isabella and Christina. “Except for her children, there is nothing in [Arianna’s] life other than her work,” says a friend.

Photograph by Art Streiber.

It’s hard to imagine that a woman whom Los Angeles magazine once described as “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers” could have been a reclusive child, but Huffington insists that as a young girl in Athens she had to be “pushed to be social, to have friends.” The older of Elli and Constantine Stassinopoulos’s two daughters, she spent most of her time alone, reading. She was encouraged in that endeavor by her mother, who encouraged almost everything she did.

Elli Stassinopoulos barely finished high school, but she taught herself five languages and read all the great philosophers. A follower of the Indian guru Krishnamurti, she showed a profound lack of interest in social conventions. For many years, until her death, in 2000, Elli lived with Arianna, and prominent New Yorkers and Hollywood moguls remember Elli pattering around barefoot at her daughter’s dinner parties, smoking a cigar. To Elli, everyone was fascinating, and she had no compunction about inviting her plumber to dinner with the prime minister, as she did once in London, in the 70s, when Arianna was dating John Selwyn Gummer, a prominent Conservative member of Parliament. Today, Huffington remembers her mother as “the biggest influence in my life. She was absolutely fearless, and a complete original.”

Her mother, Arianna says, taught her that one should never accept limits in life. “There was always that combination of making me believe I could do anything and that if I failed she wouldn’t love me any less. It was absolute, unconditional love,” she says, her eyes welling with tears. “You could try anything, because failure was not a problem.”

Arianna’s father, too, had a disregard for limits, but his influence was less benign. A newspaper publisher, he spent two years in a German concentration camp during the Second World War, and his life “was very formed” by that experience. “He had the survivor’s mentality,” Huffington says. “In his case, it was ‘I can do whatever. The rules don’t apply to me.’” He would start newspapers and then go bankrupt, throwing the family into chaos. He had “endless affairs, and it wasn’t even an issue. My favorite line,” Arianna remembers with a mirthless laugh, “was when he told my mother that she should not interfere with his private life. I can still feel her pain, because, you know, that was the big love of her life. She never had another man.” Arianna was nine when she confronted her mother and persuaded her, after a long argument, to leave her husband. According to her sister, Agapi Stassinopoulos, Arianna has always needed “to tell the truth, as she sees it. When she sees things that outrage her, she needs to be heard.”

It was her mother who encouraged her to go to Cambridge, after Arianna saw a picture of the university in a magazine and “dreamed” of going there. “Everyone else told me I was ridiculous,” she recalls. She barely spoke English, but she began to study the language, and when Cambridge accepted her Elli paid the tuition by borrowing from her brothers and selling her jewelry and, one by one, the family carpets.

From the day Arianna heard her first debate at the Cambridge Union, she says, she was addicted. “It was this extraordinary experience of seeing people, including myself, moved by words. It was orgasmic for me.” The Union, she says, “dominated my life,” but her first forays into debating were unimpressive. With her thick accent and overly aggressive and dramatic manner, she was “painful to listen to,” one fellow student recalls. But Arianna practiced “prolifically,” her sister says, and she got her reward when she became the third woman to be named president of the Cambridge Union. In a picture taken in 1971, she’s seated in a throne-like chair above a scrum of boys in white shirts and thick-rimmed glasses. She’s dressed like a Christmas tree, in an evening gown covered in glittering sequins and slit to the thigh. Her shyness had evidently been cured.

Arianna was 22 and just a year out of Cambridge when she wrote her first best-seller. The Female Woman was commissioned after Germaine Greer’s publisher heard Arianna, in 1971, debate a topic she had proposed herself: that the women’s movement denigrated marriage and motherhood. Today, Huffington says the book was a call to feminists “not to throw the baby out with the bath water,” but in fact it was an all-out assault on early feminism—a movement, she wrote, that “would destroy Western civilization.” A huge hit in Europe, the book was translated into 11 languages, and it not only brought Arianna enormous publicity but also made her financially secure for the first time in her life.

Success at such an early age, she recalls, brought on feelings of anxiety and emptiness. “Certain there was something else,” Arianna embarked on a period of spiritual searching. She read the writings of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and of Yogi Sri Aurobindo and various mystical philosophers. She did dream analysis, explored the New Age programs est and Lifespring, walked on hot coals with the life coach Tony Robbins, and got involved with a mystic who claimed to be channeling a 3,000-year-old man. “I began to see,” Huffington says, “how basically for people to find themselves spiritually there had to be an element of service, a dedication to something more than ourselves.” The result of this was her second book, After Reason, a densely written treatise that argued for the need to integrate spirituality into modern politics. Attacking the “bankruptcy of Western political leadership,” and describing politics as “our hypnotized acquiescence in this organized sham,” the book called for a “spiritual revolution” in Western democracies. Nothing less, she wrote, could save “individual freedom” in a culture where “the ‘pursuit of happiness’ has been reduced today to the pursuit of comfort.”

Published in 1978, After Reason won some respectful reviews but sold poorly. For Arianna, that meant pursuing work that paid—articles for the British editions of Vogue and Cosmopolitan, a column in the Daily Mail, book reviews for The Spectator. She also threw herself into London’s social swirl, attending every party of any distinction on the arm of equally distinctive men, most notably Bernard Levin, the lionized English intellectual-journalist who was the leading columnist at the London Times. He was, somebody once said, “half her size and twice her age,” but nevertheless he was the great passion of Huffington’s life. The two remained close until long after she had married Michael Huffington. Things might have gone differently on that front but for Levin, who was a zealous bachelor. “You see,” says Huffington, with a small laugh, “part of it was that the man I wanted to marry didn’t want to marry me.”

In 1980, Huffington came to New York to promote her third book, a biography of Maria Callas. A well-written, gossipy account of the opera diva’s tormented life, it made the best-seller lists in the U.S., as it had in England—and its success led to what would politely be called Arianna’s “remarkable” launch in American society. It happened so fast that it took a while for people to figure out how she’d done it. Just 30, brand-new in New York, and without benefit of wealth or a title, Arianna was throwing dinner parties at her East Side duplex for her new friends Marietta Tree, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Mercedes Bass, Lucky Roosevelt, Ann Getty, Dr. Jonas Salk, Lane Kirkland, and Bill Paley. There were dinners at the Reagan White House, lunches at Le Cirque, and charity balls, at which Arianna—in lavish designer gowns and Bulgari jewels—frequently earned a mention in the gossip columns. Those columns also printed the rumors (cleverly encouraged by Arianna, some said) of her relationships with well-known men such as Jerry Brown and the publisher and real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman. “The Rise and Rise of Arianna Stassinopoulos” was the headline of a 1983 New York magazine article that chronicled Arianna’s social climb, noting in particular her knack for establishing “instant intimacy” with prominent figures and her willingness to send invitations to people she barely knew.

While there were those who disliked Arianna, most were dazzled by her intelligence, her charm, and her flattery. And they would have been even if she “hadn’t come with credentials,” as one socialite put it—namely her friendship with her British publisher, Lord George Weidenfeld, whose name she used to open doors. Her “total self-confidence” made her “completely unembarrassable,” says another socialite, who remembers Arianna withdrawing invitations—“Daaahling, would you mind so much not coming to dinner?”—because she’d found a Henry Kissinger or a Barbara Walters to fill the seat. Indeed, while some people felt “badly used” by Arianna, they were rarely the ones with real influence. “It is ridiculous to call her a social climber,” says one prominent New Yorker. “She was in society, but she wasn’t climbing. Social climbing is a very serious affair, and that wasn’t her interest. She wanted power and influence. Society just happened to be there.”

Huffington won’t say much today about this phase of her life. “My Icarus phase,” she calls it, quoting from one of the snickering articles written about her at the time. As she tells it now, New York society nearly suffocated her. Going to parties, spending on clothes, and meeting fascinating people was fun, she says, but it was something that just sort of happened to her. “You know, when you arrive with a big best-seller, you have an accent, you’re Greek, a little exotic—suddenly you’re the new thing in New York.” Her flaw, she says, was that she was “too weak” to resist the attention. And so, in 1984, Arianna, with her mother in tow, suddenly left New York and moved to Los Angeles, to join her sister and to finish writing her fifth book, on Picasso.

It was the heiress Ann Getty who, the following year, introduced Arianna to Roy Michael Huffington Jr. At 35, Arianna was desperate to have children, and she remembers that Getty sat her down one day and said, “We’ve got to find you a husband.” Then Getty took out a legal pad and made a list of eligible men. Huffington was not on the list, but several months later, on the day Getty met him, she called Arianna and said, “I’ve found him!” The son of the Texas oilman Roy Huffington, Michael was 38 years old, tall, very handsome, and so reclusive that only five people in the world had his home telephone number. They met at a weekend party organized by Getty, and, says Arianna, “there is no question that, for me, it was love at first sight.” They were married in New York six months later, in April 1986, in a spectacular $110,000 wedding that Getty paid for. Arianna’s dress alone was rumored to have cost $15,000, but that extravagance paled in comparison with the guest list of 500—the icing of New York and Los Angeles society—and the bridesmaids. “Only Arianna,” says Sugar Rautbord, “could have convinced Barbara Walters, Lucky Roosevelt, and Ann Getty to walk down the aisle in little matching dresses.”

Thirteen years later, in 1999, Michael Huffington outed himself in an interview with Esquire magazine. He spoke of his homosexual encounters, his years of despair about his sexual identity, and how he’d turned to prayer hoping to be healed. He also said that Arianna had known about his sexual crisis when they married, and that she had told him it only made her love him more. Today Arianna denies she knew her husband was gay—Absolutely not,” she says. At least one friend believes her; on a conscious level, he suspects, Arianna refused to acknowledge what seemed pretty obvious to others. Another friend, however, is less convinced: “Honey, when they fixed me up with him in Houston, I knew he was gay at shrimp cocktails, and Arianna’s smarter than I am. But so what? What’s wrong with marrying a gay millionaire? It’s very practical. She got her two children and the financial wherewithal to be what she really wanted to be, which was this high-grade Cassandra.”

Arianna made her entrance onto the American political stage in 1992, the year Michael Huffington was elected to Congress. By then she’d published two more books, her best-selling biography of Picasso—which created a small, but much-publicized, scandal when she was accused of plagiarizing parts of it—and a coffee-table book on the Greek gods. Flush with his $70 million share of the $600 million sale in 1990 of his father’s oil company, Huffco, Michael decided that he wanted to be a politician. A conservative Republican, he ran for the congressional seat representing Santa Barbara, and spent $5.2 million on a bitter, slash-and-burn campaign to defeat first the popular nine-term Republican incumbent in the primary and then his Democratic challenger.

After he won, however, it was Arianna who attracted all the attention. She handled many of his press interviews and approved all of his public statements, and it was said he couldn’t make a decision without calling Arianna to ask for guidance. But if Michael Huffington was considered something of a joke in Washington, Arianna was not. Soon after her husband took office, she attracted the attention of Newt Gingrich, the rabble-rousing congressman from Georgia, with a speech she gave challenging the Republican Party to rise to what she called “the core of true conservatism,” and commit itself to fighting poverty and inequality. Within weeks, she had become part of Gingrich’s informal brain trust and co-founder of his Center for Effective Compassion, which was supposed to find ways to develop a conservative anti-poverty agenda.

Everyone makes mistakes—or “loses perspective,” as Arianna puts it—and, without a doubt, Arianna’s biggest misstep was persuading her husband to run for the Senate in 1994 against Dianne Feinstein. He almost won—after spending a record $30 million of his fortune on vicious attack ads and expensive advisers—but Arianna’s reputation was savaged in the process. “The most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’ve met in thirty years in national politics,” her husband’s campaign manager, the well-known Republican strategist Ed Rollins, would later write about Arianna in his memoirs. The book alleged, among other things, that, as her husband was taking a tough stand on illegal immigrants, Arianna lied to Rollins about her nanny’s undocumented status. He also claimed that she had hired investigators to collect dirt on Feinstein and on Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth, when she was writing what turned out to be a corrosive profile of the Huffingtons. It’s an allegation Arianna strenuously denies, although today some supporters of Tim Russert question whether Arianna’s tough coverage of Russert, who is married to Orth, has been influenced by Orth’s 1994 article.

Arianna had just published her sixth book, The Fourth Instinct, whose thesis was that humanity’s hunger for spirituality was as fundamental as its drives for sex, survival, and power, and that poverty and inequality could be overcome if people volunteered more. Her argument that the whole social-welfare net could be eliminated if people gave part of their incomes to charity had become a central theme of her husband’s campaign—which was not helped when the staff at two Santa Barbara charities Arianna claimed to be sponsoring told the press they’d seen her only once or twice, when she’d shown up with television crews.

And then there was John-Roger. The press went wild with the allegation that Arianna had been, since the late 1970s, a minister in the guru’s Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA). A New Age spiritualist whose seminars and books advance a regimen of therapy, positive thinking, and rigorous self-improvement, John-Roger was also believed by his followers to embody the “Mystical Traveler Consciousness,” which inhabits God’s chosen one on earth. It was never clear whether Arianna believed, as many of John-Roger’s adherents did, that he was the personification of God and that he could read her mind, heal her illnesses, and even endow her with the power to change the weather. Over and over, she obfuscated as the press dogged her with questions about John-Roger, whom ex-followers accused in the press of mind control, electronic eavesdropping, and sexually coercing his male acolytes. Several former adherents also said that John-Roger had almost completely controlled Arianna, financing her lavish lifestyle in New York in return for introductions to her powerful friends, guiding her through her courtship with Huffington (she allegedly called him after each date “to see what God would do next”), and instructing her to marry Huffington for his money. When asked about John-Roger, Arianna denied these allegations and claimed that he was just a friend, and that she knew very little about his teachings. “I have not spent many years in his training,” she told Vanity Fair in 1994. “Nobody’s been a guru to me.”

“Looking back, some of my answers were so stupid,” Arianna says now. The press, she says, was out to play “gotch-you,” and she was confused, she says, by her husband’s campaign advisers’ attempts to silence her on the subject—a move that wasn’t surprising, given that she was appearing on Christian television shows promoting her husband’s support of school prayer. Of John-Roger she now says that he “remains a very good friend of mine. He’s had dinner here very recently, [and] I got so much value and continue to get so much value from his teachings, and that’s the story. There was never any attempt to proselytize.” She still won’t say whether she was or is a minister in John-Roger’s MSIA, or if she believes that he is the embodiment of God. But she says she continues to be inspired by his books, tapes, and seminars, and particularly by “his emphasis on forgiveness.… He talks a lot about how forgiveness starts with self-forgiveness, and as somebody who is incredibly self-judgmental, I learned to forgive myself, to forgive my mistakes.”

Her behavior on the campaign was definitely one of those mistakes. It was something she wanted too much, she says, and she was devastated by her husband’s loss at the polls. But John-Roger “talks a lot about [life] as a spiral,” says Arianna. “It’s not a linear progression. You have things that take you down, in order to take you up. In the spiral, [the campaign] was definitely downward, personally and professionally. But I don’t think we’re given anything we can’t learn from.”

Not one to give up in the face of defeat, Arianna returned to Washington in the fall of 1994 and threw herself into promoting the Gingrich Revolution. Night after night, in the heady aftermath of the Republican takeover of Congress and Gingrich’s ascension to Speaker of the House, she threw parties in her vast, $4 million home, in Wesley Heights, gathering the city’s leading intellectuals, journalists, and politicians. She called her evenings “critical mass” dinners, and billed them as an attempt at finding nonpartisan solutions to the country’s social problems. Arianna also reportedly taped these dinners—although she says it happened only once—and used the recordings, along with copious notes she would take at other social events, as fodder for a political column she began to write. Glib and provocative, Arianna’s column, which was nationally syndicated beginning in 1995, cleverly articulated the anti-Clinton sentiments that animated the right wing in the 90s. “If Hillary is indicted,” she asked in 1996, “can Al Gore become First Lady?” In time, after Arianna hired a voice coach to mute her accent, she became an in-demand conservative television pundit. By 1996 she was co-hosting “Strange Bedfellows,” Comedy Central’s coverage of the political conventions, sitting in bed, in a nightgown, with Al Franken.

By then, says Franken, there were signs that Arianna wasn’t comfortable toeing the Republican line. “It was during the 1996 Republican convention, and we’re sitting in bed, and her job is to be a Republican, and she’s having the hardest time trying to defend [Republican presidential candidate] Bob Dole. Her heart just wasn’t in it.” Arianna now says that Franken “sped up my pulling away” from the Republican Party. Franken was writing his book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and he would “say to me, ‘Here’s what Limbaugh said,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, come on, he didn’t say that.’” So Franken would play her the tapes of Limbaugh’s remarks and of Gingrich’s speeches as well—”and that,” she recalls, “opened my eyes to what Gingrich and Limbaugh were really saying.”

In the early days of her association with Gingrich, Arianna says, she believed that he was committed to developing a conservative program to fight poverty and inequality. But she grew more and more disturbed by the Republican focus on cutting the budget, particularly for social programs. “I was bamboozled,” she says. “My focus has always been ‘How do you make a more equal society and take care of those in need?’ I’ve always been pro-choice, pro–gay rights, pro–gun control; there has been no change there. The very fundamental change has been in one area, which is the role for government.”

Her spiritual search had led her to the Republican Party, she says. Guided by the “huge biblical admonition that you shall be judged by what you do for the least among us,” Arianna says, she came to believe that “it had to be done by all of us … because if we would simply delegate to government, and pay our taxes, and go on with our narcissistic lives, it would not be the point of life.” But then she saw that, while people were giving away millions to fashionable charities, they were not giving enough to social programs. “I’m a big believer to this day that you also cannot solve the problems of this country without people stepping up to the plate and contributing time and money,” she says. “I mean, can you imagine what would happen if everyone tithed 10 percent of their income or their time? The effect would be amazing.” But her swing to the left came when she saw that that was “unrealistic” and “that the problems were so huge that you needed the raw power of government appropriations to address them.”

Today, Arianna has no friends left from her Republican days. “To them, I had to be wrong,” she says. Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s former press secretary, is one of the few people from that time she still sees; she debates him every week on public radio’s Left, Right & Center. “I guess I’ve been around long enough that it doesn’t surprise me when people start joining on with a rising cause,” Blankley says. “I don’t necessarily assume it’s a lifelong commitment. So it didn’t crush me when she crossed.” As for the final break between Gingrich and Arianna—which, she has written, occurred in 1997, when he sent her a sharp note chiding her for criticizing Republican policy on the drug war—Blankley says he never heard Gingrich mention it. Arianna, he says, was “not a close or important adviser to Newt. If she hadn’t been the wife of a congressman—a wealthy congressman—she wouldn’t have had that much face time.”

Even in Hollywood, some still wonder whether Arianna’s leftward move was mostly prompted by her 1997 divorce from Michael Huffington and her decision to return to Los Angeles—“where,” says one friend, “she would not have gotten invited to a lot of parties if she were right-wing.” Her first forays into Liberal Nation were met with suspicion. People would back away from her at parties or ask her outright, “What are you doing here?” A number of contributors to The Nation were wary when the liberal magazine accepted Arianna’s offer to throw its annual—and now, with Arianna as hostess, star-studded—Los Angeles book-fair party at her home. “There are a lot of people who don’t trust her and won’t have anything to do with her,” says one left-wing writer, but Arianna slowly won most people over. As in New York and Washington, her intelligence and charm went a long way toward smoothing her path. Asked at a party by one liberal columnist why she had crossed over to the left, Arianna leaned close and whispered in his ear, “It was the sex, of course.”

To her friends, there is no question that Arianna is sincere in her latest political incarnation. Unlike many people, they say, she’s had the courage to change. “People have gone from being liberal to conservative, and there’s nothing wrong with that. People are entitled to learn and grow,” says her close friend Sherry Lansing, the former chairman of Paramount Pictures. The hours Arianna has spent raising money and organizing for grassroots groups no one has ever heard of is proof, some say, of her commitment. During the 2000 political conventions, “spending thousands of dollars of her own money,” according to her sister, Arianna organized two “shadow conventions.” Held in L.A. and Philadelphia at the same time as the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively, they featured speakers from a wide array of environmental, anti-poverty, and social-justice organizations. The shadow conventions were “grungy,” panelists recall, their participants “disproportionately people who wore backpacks,” but they got national press coverage because of the speakers Arianna had personally lined up—among them John McCain, Al Franken, and Jesse Jackson.

Friends say Arianna was under no illusion that the shadow conventions would make much of an impact on the national political dialogue. Nor, they say, did she believe that she would win when she ran for governor of California. Both were attempts, Arianna says, to draw attention to “the interests of millions of Americans who don’t have lobbyists” and to issues that “are left out of the political calculations and decision-making” by political leaders. Looking back, however, Arianna says she’d never run for political office again, and it’s easy to see why. A wacky political spectacle involving 135 candidates, ranging from movie actors to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and a former porn star, the recall campaign was not a high point in Arianna’s career. There was the trip over the microphones, and then there was the vicious attack by syndicated columnist and former Clinton adviser Susan Estrich, accusing Arianna of being a neglectful mother. Soon after she launched her campaign, lambasting “corporate fat cats” who get away with not paying their fair share of taxes, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Arianna had paid zero state income tax and only $771 in federal taxes during the previous two years. Arianna said that her 2002 income of $183,000 was far exceeded by her business expenses and losses of $2.67 million and insisted that all the deductions she’d taken, while aggressive, were legitimate. The defense was a flop. “Do you have a problem with hypocrisy?” one reporter shouted at her during a press conference.

With her standing in the polls at a negligible 3 percent, Arianna dropped out of the race a week before Election Day. Politically speaking, the campaign was a disaster, but it had its upside on the publicity front. In the space of two months, Arianna had made herself a household name in California.

Still, the hardest thing for Huffington, says her sister, was “seeing how the world was being sucked in by Schwarzenegger, not because of his values but because of his Hollywood celebrity and his money.” To Arianna, it must have felt like watching herself lose at her own game. For if anything unites all of Arianna Huffington’s incarnations, it is her understanding of the power of money, glamour, and fame to seduce—and her ability to use that power. Those who have dismissed her as an intellectual performance artist are not entirely wrong, but they underestimate her. “She is very strategically savvy,” says the liberal author and Huffington fan Eric Alterman. “Part of her effectiveness is her shamelessness. Being in bed with Al Franken—I saw that and at first I thought, What the fuck? But it was a very effective way to get your views across in this crazy, mixed-up country of ours.”

Arianna’s knack for getting attention is something Tony Blankley admires, despite their political differences. It involves, he says, “the ability to do and say things that will be ridiculed and to keep on doing them. It was that way with Newt Gingrich. Sometimes you’re vindicated, sometimes not. But to be able to have people laugh at you and push on takes a lot of courage. Arianna is a performer, a promoter. She’s usually promoting ideas, though, and she’s very good at it.”

And so, on this Friday afternoon, the phones keep ringing. “Can you arrange for a telephonic appointment?,” Arianna asks the assistant who leans in to whisper a caller’s name. “Daaahling, can I call him back tomorrow?” she says minutes later, when the assistant reappears to report another call. Arianna leans back on the couch sipping her tea, and in the dim light of her study she looks tired. In addition to the countless dinner parties, TV appearances, and blog entries, she has immersed herself in the business side of the Huffington Post—pulling in advertisers, persuading the Chicago Tribune to syndicate the site’s blogs, and negotiating the deals with AOL and Yahoo. While most blogs are low-cost affairs, the HuffPost, with its paid staff of seven in New York and Los Angeles, cost an estimated $2 million to set up. The largest investment came from Kenneth Lerer and his family, but other backers reportedly include Larry and Laurie David. With more advertisers, including MTV and Sony, signing on, Lerer expects the Huffington Post to break even by the end of this year, but friends believe Arianna is hoping for more: that her first entrepreneurial venture will end up turning a profit.

It is too soon to predict whether the site will be a moneymaker, but “in terms of political influence,” says the former USA Today columnist and HuffPost contributor Walter Shapiro, “this may be the biggest thing that Arianna’s done.” The public disenchantment with the mainstream media, the growing dissatisfaction with the Republican leadership, the burgeoning demand for 24-7 news, and the exploding interest in the blogosphere have all combined, media critics say, to create a potentially huge audience for the Huffington Post.

There are those who say that Arianna Huffington wants nothing more than power; others say that she’s driven by an overwhelming need for attention. But Arianna has also wanted influence—“to be a superstar” but also, says an old friend, “to change the world.” Never doctrinaire, even as a conservative, according to one press critic, “she was more about vision.” And it has always been a quirky vision, one that has made her a better sniper than a general. “Arianna’s an advocate for her point of view,” says Lerer. “She doesn’t like the status quo, whatever the status quo may be at the moment, and when the dust settles, it’s time to make the dust fly again.”

With the Huffington Post, Arianna might finally have it all—attention, influence, and the chance to showcase her ideas and those of her interesting friends in the biggest dinner party she’s ever thrown. But there’s something more as well. “I honestly think,” says Sugar Rautbord, “that Arianna believes she was put on this earth to make a difference. If she can’t be president or senator, then she’ll be part of this great Greek chorus trying to change people’s opinions.”

After a lifetime of spiritual searching, of trying to find a way to feel meaningful, Arianna may just have found her calling. “Sometimes you make a difference by helping to convince a few people,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a difference at the national level. You help people articulate, and not doubt, what they already believe. I totally believe in the tipping point, or the critical mass. For me there are three different terms for the same thing: the tipping point, the critical mass, and also grace, the spiritual concept of grace. You do your 10 percent and then grace is extended—if this is what is to happen. If it is what is right.” Or, these days, even if it’s left.